Lone Wolf #6: Chicago Slaughter (3 page)

Wulff came out of the booth slowly, leaving the valise where it was. Had to do it, no choice. He was being held by the big man with the huge gun. Flanking him, left and right, were a couple of others, nondescript types; both of them looked at him impassively, hands in their pockets. They might have guns in there, they might not; the only way to tell was to try them and it was too soon for that. Other than that there were only four or five others in the store now, the clumps of numbers players or whatever they were having disappeared. The owner, his palms flat to the counter was looking in Wulff’s direction with astonishment; the others seated at counter seats were huddling protectively, two gripping themselves. So that was good. That was good then. Coming out of the booth he had thought that he might be taking on an entire group of men, all of the numbers players turning out to be
soldati.
But it had not been that informed a setup at all. A lend-lease operation. There was only the heavy man and his two assistants handling this, and they had waited out their time until the store had emptied because they had been as afraid of the crowd as Wulff had been.

Live and learn; learn and live. This was probably another freelance operation, a group of bounty hunters who had stumbled across the information somewhere and were trying to move ahead. Marginal types. It meant that he had a shot at this, although of course not an excellent one. Still, he looked much better than he thought he would when he came out of that booth.

“Now listen here,” said the owner. He was a small man, his white apron spattered with chocolate stains. “I don’t know what this is but we can’t have any of that here. You take it outside. You take it outside right now or I’m going to call the police. I—”

“Shut the fuck up you prick,” the heavy man said in that gentle little voice of his and piveted, aimed the gun and deposited a cartridge in the wall. The gun recoiled on him, causing his shoulders to quiver and then a few splinters sifted delicately out of the wall, dropped on the owner’s scalp. He put a hand to the bald spot trembling, brought it away, inspected it. Looking for blood. Wulff knew the feeling.

“Stay out of it now,” the heavy man said. To Wulff he said, “We’re all going to get out of here now. We’re going to take a nice, quiet amiable little walk down the line here and out the door and into my car and then we’ll see what we see. Don’t forget the valise,” he said to the man on his left, “take it out of there nice and easy.” The other man blinked, as if the idea of touching the valise had never occurred to him; he was the kind of man who worked by the numbers and this had been an outside shot. “Don’t stand their thinking,” the heavy man said in that soft, sweet whisper and momentarily the gun shifted, “just do it.”

So he might be a bounty hunter, Wulff thought, but he was working with recruited help. That was interesting. That was very interesting, but he didn’t want his attention to narrow down exclusively to the man with the gun because this would be equally dangerous. The three had to be taken on as a team but they were not the tightest and most integrated unit. He stood there quietly, making no moves. He could go for the gun in his inside coat pocket but then again he would not. That would only draw attention to the fact that he had a gun and he trusted the heavy man’s reflexes. “Go on!” the man with the gun said again. “Get it!”

Delicately, the man on the left peeled off and reached into the booth. He took the valise by the handle and then with some effort tugged it out. It caught on the lip of the stand and Wulff thought for a moment that it might jam there, the same thought occurred to the man, panic flared and then he had the valise fully, held it panting, a few inches off the ground. The other man, the man on the right smiled faintly and licked his lips.

“All right,” the heavy man said with a directing wave of the gun. “The two of you go ahead with that and keep a lookout; I’ll take this one out myself.” That was even more interesting; he was carrying on the operation now as if he had three men under cover instead of just one, a definite, hounded aspect here and in that moment Wulff saw that he could probably take him. It was not three against one after all; it was
mano a mano
with witnesses and the heavy man did not truly have the situation under control. He was working on Wulff but doing so without a clear sense of purpose and it had to be fear which was driving him as much as greed. Certainly, not frisking Wulff had been a very poor move, it was elementary procedure … but then he did not trust the other two to carry on the frisk competently and he was afraid to get too close to Wulff himself. So the situation was manageable. It was damned close to even—perhaps even a little better than that because Wulff would know when he was going to move but the heavy man would not.

“Come on,” the man with the gun said as the other two went out the door, the valise following in grip like a puppy. “Let’s get going.”

Slowly Wulff moved, following the arc of the gun, went down the line of stools at the counter, heading toward the wedge of light showing through the open door. The owner stood in that frozen position, hands on the counter watching him go; Wulff passed within an inch of the man and then beyond. Out of his class here. Numbers trade was one thing but assault with a deadly weapon was another. The owner probably had established his own code of values which had something to do with the fact that anything he did was legal and morally justified but anything beyond that was not. A good system. Most people worked that way. Wulff kept on moving, not even looking back. He assumed that the gun was still on him but even if it was not, if there was some lapse of attention back there, he wanted to do the owner a favor. He would not give him a murder in his candy store in Rego fucking Park. Cops, detectives, investigations, notice and picture in the
Daily News
; it would blow his sideline sky-high. Be merciful. Render unto men in equal parts what they deserve.

He was in the street now. The valise was on the ground, the two men flanking it the way they had flanked the gunman, left and right, looking past one another. They were standing in front of an old Fleetwood, rust spots on the chrome panels, damage to the rear quarter panel, probably the heavy man’s car. A banged up piece of junk; elegance corroded to bargain rates. A bounty hunter’s kind of vehicle. The heavy man was behind him, prodding. There were a couple of people on the street but no one seemed particularly interested in what was going on. Why should they be? This was New York and furthermore they could be filming a television segment, the valise a portable camera. No one gave a damn; if they wanted to get involved they could see it on the box in six months.

“Open the door,” the heavy man said to the one who had carried the valise. He did the heavy work; the other one was backup, probably. Hierarchy in every aspect of life: everything was the army. Sergeants and corporals. Captains. The door came open reluctantly, squeaking. Wulff turned, measuring out the proper leverage and direction by the sound of the voice and chopped the heavy man in the throat.

The heavy man gagged. Blood came into his face, suffused, dripped from his mouth. As Wulff turned, measuring him, the man tried to get the gun up but the effort seemed beyond him; it seemed for a moment as if he didn’t remember what the gun was or what these things were for and his body slowly caved in. “Son of a bitch,” he was trying to say, Wulff could see the motions of his throat, deduce it from the movement of the lips but the blow had taken away laryngeal functioning and now paralysis was setting in; the gun fell from his hand, he collapsed to the pavement. “Son of a bitch,” he said again and Wulff bent over, took the gun and in the same motion kicked the heavy man in the head. He lay there, his eyes open, searching out parts of the sky. His mouth moved again. He seemed to be looking for some kind of explanation.

The other two already had their hands in the air. They were making no movements whatsoever. Indeed, their expressions, the way they held their bodies seemed to be a kind of anti-menace; they were sending Wulff signals in every way that they wanted no part of him. Wulff looked at the valise in place on the sidewalk and then he looked at the men and the disgust was suddenly total; he spat on the sidewalk and then spat again, forcing mucus, feeling a rage within him so thickly impacted that the only way around seemed to be to
spit
it out, God help him but that would not work either. For this. For this they had brought death up against him. They did not even know what death was.

“You stupid sons of bitches,” he said and now there was no one in sight at all, not even the face of the owner staring through the mist of the candy store window, he probably having gone to call the police, “you’ve got to be crazy.” He pointed to the valise. “Do you really want this?” he said. “Is it so fucking important? You really want to take this on?”

He stared at them and the one on the right, the one who had moved the valise out, senior movement expert number one said, “You’ve got this all wrong.”

“Have I?”

“You’ve got this all wrong. Wulff,” he said, looking at him almost pleadingly. The heavy man stirred on the pavement, made vomiting sounds. “We weren’t here to kill you.”

“Oh no,” he said, “you weren’t here to kill me. Just for an interview.”

“Put the gun away, Wulff,” the man said. The fact that he could talk without being shot down seemed to have given him confidence. If anything, his voice seemed mildly authoritative. “Cooperate. Cooperate with us. I tried to tell him that you would do it anyway if it was only explained.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Wulff,” the other man said, “Wulff come to your senses. Cooperate with us.” He reached inside his clothing and Wulff thought for an instant that it might be a gun but then he knew that no man, not even one like this, could do something so inconceivably stupid so he held his ground. The man took a flat leather case out of his pocket and opened it arm extended, held it so that Wulff could see. “Wulff,” he said, “we’re federal agents.”

He let the one with the credentials drive, the other one in the back against him, the valise wedged in a corner. Wulff was neither shocked nor bothered after the first half-minute of surprise; it had just shifted to a different level, that was all. He had to change his modus operandi, look at things in another context. They had left the heavy man on the sidewalk, the decision being that it made no difference what he had to say when the cops came along. Which they probably would any moment. The heavy man would reach the right people and talk his way out of it, probably without reference to Wulff. Now the thing to do was to get the Fleetwood and the other two with the valise out of there. Wulff could see the good sense of that. He even let one do the driving while the other talked. He had the gun, he had essential control of the situation. Except that the situation was mad.

They were federal agents, all right. They were loosely attached to the federal narcotics bureau, not on an actual payroll but freelancers who appeared to be paid off the books by federal funds in varying amounts. The reason for this was because the president’s commission or at least a part of it had declared a war on drugs three years ago; but the war on drugs, because of the nature of the enemy, had to be highly confidential and carried on by the kind of people who generally could not pass the standards of federal employment. Also the methods that these people used were unconventional. The administration had decided that the only way to carry on the campaign was with guerrilla tactics and through means that stuffy investigatorial types might find illegal. So it was basically a covert operation, carried on by disreputable types operating under loose supervision in unplanned ways toward an unpredictable end. A typical federal operation after all, Wulff thought wryly. Except, of course, that these men were dead-serious, they were the most serious types that he had met yet. Even more so than the distributors, and there was nothing funny about them at all. If their level of competence had been anywhere near their level of seriousness and degree of energy, they might have cleaned out the drug trade months before Wulff ever got into it on his own stick. As it was, however, they seemed to be losing ground.

At least they were
willing
to admit that they were losing ground. Trapped, held at bay in the car, their superior eliminated, the two that he had with him seemed almost eager to confess their imcompetence and failure as if this somehow would make things go easier on them in the long run.

“Well, we knew all about you Wulff,” the talkative one said. (The driver had to bring his full level of concentration to the task simply to avoid going off the road; he was one of those people who was simply ill-equipped to get along in a post-technological situation but then again he kept on trying.) “Your name and number are just known to everyone in the network and we figured that we’d take a shot at you, not because we thought you were a double-agent or anything like that, you understand, but because we had heard what kind of stuff you were able to pick out of Vegas before you were waylaid to Havana. We could take a million dollars worth of smack out of the market, right? But we really fucked this one up, I admit it, Wulff, we didn’t know what we were up against. Guess we should have taken you more seriously, eh? Guess we thought you were some kind of clown but oh boy were we wrong, Wulff. Were we
wrong!
You’re just the toughest that we’ve ever been up against. Boy, you really know what you’re doing, don’t you?”

And so on and so forth. The talker would not go into any aspect of his background but to Wulff he sounded like a type who had been thrown off a local police force somewhere for drunkenness, but because of his vast law-enforcement background had been able to convince the federal authorities that he was equal to the job. At least that was the way that these things generally went. The more removed the branch of civil service was from the street level the less competent it was, and just as the NYC force was at least close or closer to the people, nothing could be further from the realities of the drug trade than the federal government. He supposed.

He had told the driver to take them on a long loop of the city, onto the Grand Central Parkway and over the Triborough into Manhattan, the East River Drive clear down to the South Street viaduct, then up the West Side Highway, to the Cross Bronx Expressway and down the East River Drive to the Triborough again. This gave him plenty of time to consider the issue while he pumped them and decided what his next move would be…. But exactly what the hell was he going to do? What was proper? He had to fill in the background but the background seemed to make absolutely no sense.

They had tracked him, these three, from shortly after the time he had hit the border clear through to Rego Park; they had picked him up in the South and in the ruined Fleetwood had pursued him, sometimes at a gap of miles, other times close in, all the way to Rego Park. They had no other assignment except to pick up Wulff and his valise which enabled them to concentrate upon the matter at hand. Wulff would have conceived of federal agents as being busy fellows: a conference here, a meeting there, an apprehension there, a bit of surveillance now. But no: he had been their sole client and they had been following him for days, following at various distances, finally closing in at Rego Park because the heavy man who had been the nominal leader of the team had made the decision that Wulff might be arranging to rid himself of the valise.

It all sounded vaguely insane to Wulff but then on the other hand it was not insane at all; he supposed that it exactly fitted the way people like this would work. Three men on one. What had they planned to do with him after they got him under wraps? Well, the speaker was not exactly sure. That was up to the leader of the team. They hadn’t discussed it.

A pretty dismal life. Wulff could imagine the three of them jammed into the old car, moving silently on their sullen pursuit. Now and then they would pause for gasoline, more rarely they would pull into some bleak motel for the night, the leader making sure to get receipts at every stage of the journey so that he could put in for governmental reimbursement. They would stay at the cheapest places, of course, and watch the budget. But then again, considering the backgrounds of these men and what appeared to be their general intelligence level, it was possible that they were doing quite well. They were on a payroll, after all, and part of the federal war on drugs. Also they had credentials and were permitted to carry firearms which for people like this would be comforting.

“I know where we were supposed to go,” the driver said. He had said very little during the thirty to forty minutes that the other one had been talking, filling Wulff in on all of the details, concentrating on the job of keeping the Fleetwood on the road which, as Wulff had already decided, was something that tested him up to his full energy levels and even a little beyond it.

“I mean, I don’t know exactly what we were supposed to do with you, that was up to Frank and he never told us. But we were supposed to take the valise into Chicago. There’s some kind of federal prosecution there, a grand-jury investigation and so on and the valise was supposed to be taken in there if we ever found it. Of course, I don’t think they were too sure that we would ever score.”

Wulff could imagine this too: the man Frank, the leader traveling for days with these men and holding to himself the secret of Wulff’s disposition. It would seem impossible that three men, supposedly working as a team, would consist of one giving orders and two who did nothing, but that also was the way that the government managed its affairs. “A grand jury investigation in Chicago,” he said, “introducing the valise as evidence.”

“Something like that,” the driver said. “He wasn’t too clear, we didn’t get too many facts. Frank said that it was for our own good; the less we knew the less we had to bother us.”

He held the steering wheel with one hand, dug into his pocket and passed over to Wulff a card with the name
PATRICK WILSON
typed on it with a couple of strikeovers and a telephone number scribbled underneath. “He’s a district attorney there,” the driver said. “Something like that, they weren’t too specific. Anyway, we were supposed to get in touch with him. We were supposed to bring the valise to him and let him handle it from then on in. Some kind of investigation,” he mumbled, “a federal grand jury, that was it.”

“And what about me?”

“What’s that?”

“You had the disposition of the valise all plotted out,” Wulff said. “Patrick Wilson and his staff. But what was supposed to happen to me?”

“Happen to you?”

“What did Frank intend to do with me?” Wulff said. It was like interrogation. You hit the point and then you hit it again; you persisted, phrasing it slightly differently each time and eventually they folded. Or they did not.

“Why I don’t know,” the driver said sullenly, “I don’t know at all.” And as if the effort of speaking, backgrounding Wulff this far, had taken the last of language out of him, he turned his full attention to the windshield, peering out at the road, muttering something to himself. Wulff let him stay in that lapsed silence, looked out the window himself.

“What are you going to do with us?” the man in the back said.

“What’s that?”

“I said, what are you going to do with us?”

“Why,” Wulff said, “I don’t know. I have the same difficulty in making decisions that you do. What was Frank planning to do with me?”

“We told you,” the man in the back said. “We just don’t know. He was giving orders, we followed along. He was the senior man, we weren’t even on the payroll. We’re federal agents, you know and theoretically you’re still in our custody.” Wulff turned around and looked at him intensely, the man’s eyes dropped into an almost boyish shyness. “Well it’s true,” he said, “you
are
in our charge. You’ve overpowered one of our senior men and you’ve kidnapped us …”

“All right,” Wulff said, “let’s pull the car over.”

They had just come off the Triborough again, onto the sudden four lanes of the Grand Central Parkway opening up under the railroad trestle at Jamaica, the Fleetwood in the far left lane, the driver struggling. “What’s that?” he said.

“Pull the car over,” Wulff said again, “we’re going to get off the highway.”

“This is ridiculous,” the driver said, “there are thousands of cars around here, passing this point every hour, we’re two blocks from a subway station; you don’t think that you can—”

“Get it off the road!” Wulff said harshly and gave the wheel a yank. The driver let out a little scream as he felt the car momentarily lurch away from control, grappled with it, brought it frantically three lanes across the highway and onto the shoulder, other cars squalling as they went past. The driver pumped the brake desperately, brought the car to a rolling stop and then, finally, put his hands back on the wheel and looked at Wulff sidelong, attempting, Wulff could see, self-control. But under the surface terror burbled. “You can’t get away with this,” he said.

“Out of the car.”

The man in the back said, “Wulff, listen, we were just doing a job. We didn’t even
know
what was going on—”

“Out of the car,” Wulff said again. Interrogation procedure. Hit the point and then hit it again. He showed them the gun he had taken from Frank, a large Beretta, clumsier than what he would have liked himself but probably the ideal weapon for a federal systems and investigations man.

The two clambered out of the car, driver to driver’s side, the other one taking the rear door on the far side. They stood near traffic, blinking, looking at passing cars as if each contained some aspect of salvation.

“Over here,” Wulff said. He gestured with the gun.

Reluctantly, shambling they came over. They could not seem to abandon the thought of rescue from the highway; they kept on casting glances over there as if any moment an unmarked limousine would pull over and from it would pour agents of every description holding firearms, perhaps the president of the United States, riding incognito, come to present them a medal for faithful and laudatory service. “It just isn’t right,” one of them said again. Out of their roles as driver and speaker, Wulff could not individuate any longer. They were the same. All of them were the same. Only the labels changed. “Isn’t right,” the man said again like a child.

Wulff looked at them. Frozen to position, shaking, they did not look like pursuers. Under the point of the gun, assailants never did. Brought to bay, the power relationship reversed, they all came down to the same thing: vulnerability, helplessness. If only you could pull a gun on the world, he thought … but only the Cicchinis, the Marascos, the cold men who injected the poison and lived on their sheltered mountains and sea-coasts … only they believed that it could be done. The rest of the world had to struggle along without the relief of confrontation. “You stupid sons of bitches,” he said. “You don’t know what the hell is going on.”

That seemed to set well with them. At least they did not seem disposed to argue, standing in attitudes of contrition by the road, traffic moving by fast, the three of them standing at the bottom of the bowl of fumes which was Queens. “What the hell did you think that you were going to do?” he asked. “What the hell was your war anyway?”

They still said nothing, exchanging one blank look of consultation in which Wulff thought that he could read everything. Let him talk himself out, that look said. Yeah, let him do that. Maybe all he wants to do is talk. We’ll get him another day. Maybe. Maybe. They returned their attention to him like fish fascinated at the end of a line, slowly being hauled out of the sea. “You had to be out of your minds,” Wulff said.

They looked at him. Imperceptibly they nodded. Yes, the nod said, have it your way, we were out of our minds. And looking at them in that moment Wulff had a clear flare of intimation: nothing would ever be different. He could kill them but he could not change them. Right up until the end, no less than Cicchini or Marasco, they would believe that they were right. They would die holding onto their righteousness; the Cicchinis because they had mapped out the game and won it, these two because they believed in the forces that had sent them there. No way to change them. No way to get clear and to the other side, no way to bring them to awareness of the fact that they were fools and that their mission was as doomed and corrupt as that of the Cicchinis. They would not listen. No one was going to listen. As long as he went on it would always be the same; right up to this instant of confrontation when he would come up against impermeability.